When working on any type of project, there's nothing more frustrating than being told to do different things by different people. If a manager tells you to go ahead and start working on their website using the template they'd signed off on, only to contact you later and say that there's been a change of plans, the CEO has a different vision in mind, it's very easy to lose moral.>
The creation of a site is a collaborative process that needs the full cooperation of everyone involved. What should be a relatively smooth process can spiral into an uncommunicative mess if not everyone is on the same page.
For the majority of the time we're working on a website, we don't have face to face contact with our clients. Initial meetings give way to phone calls and e-mails, and it becomes that much harder to ensure that what we have in mind for the site is the same vision that our customers see. This is why it's so important to note the number of redesigns that are allowed in your initial site conception, and to take signing off on designs seriously.
The amount of time that goes into creating a template is often undermined by people who have never attempted it before. Our designers have to take a flat, static image from a piece of paper and code it into a working website. Making a change (such as a different colour scheme, logo, layout, etc.) once the coding has begun is not a simple process. Changing one thing can have knock-on effects for the design of the entire site, and going back through the code and re-writing it when they should have been past this stage and moving on to other aspects of the site is time consuming and often frustrating.
As we liaison mainly through phone calls and e-mails, we can end up talking to different people throughout the process. A lot of the time whoever answers the phone isn't up to date on where we're at in the design process or of any issues that we may have been calling about, which means that our time is wasted getting them up to speed before we can even delve into our reason for calling.
Similarly, if there is an issue people are prone to palm it off. The manager might say the CEO is delaying the approval, or the CEO might say that they never got the IT department's e-mail, for example. The point is, no matter whose fault it is, the problem takes up valuable time and creates a hassle where one doesn't need to exist. Make sure to take responsibility and ensure that everything is on track - it's not hard, and will impress the bosses.
Open channels of communication between everyone involved with the website - from ourselves to our clients, from the IT departments to the staff to the managers to the big bosses and vice-versa - is vital. Miscommunications are the most common reason behind delays in getting sites live, and they can be easily avoided.